One of the best features of iCloud is its ability to keep your calendar events and reminders in the cloud and let you share your calendars with family, friends, and colleagues. Tom Negrino walks you through how to work with calendars and reminders in iCloud.

One of the best—and incredibly useful—features of iCloud is its ability to keep your calendar events and reminders in the cloud, automatically synchronizing them among all your devices. Imagine you’ve just finished an appointment at the dentist, and the receptionist asks to set up your next date. Whipping out your iPhone, you enter the next appointment into the Calendar app, and in a moment, that appointment appears on the rest of your devices.

Similarly, iCloud can create synchronized reminders for things you need to do. With the iOS 5 Reminders app, you can even set a reminder to appear only when you arrive at a particular geographical location.

But probably the most useful feature of iCloud calendaring is that you can share your calendars with family, friends, and colleagues. So when your daughter adds her soccer practice to the family shared calendar, it appears on the rest of the family’s schedule as well.

Setting up Calendars

You begin with calendars in iCloud by creating them, either in iCal or in the iOS Calendar app. You can also create calendars on the iCloud website , which I’ll discuss later in this chapter.

There’s one important concept to get when you start managing your schedule and to-dos with iCloud. There are two kinds of items that iCloud deals with:

Events are items that appear in the body of your calendar views. They will appear in the Day, Week, Month, and List views. They always have dates and times associated with them (though sometimes the associated time is “all-day”).

Reminders are to-do items. They work differently than they did with MobileMe, in that Reminders “calendars” now appear in a separate Reminders section in the Calendar List in iCal and the iCloud website (as such, a group of reminders is now properly called a Reminder List, not a Calendar) and you work with them in the iOS Reminders app, rather than with the Calendar app. Reminders don’t appear in the calendar views; you have to show the Reminders pane in iCal and the iCloud website to see them. Reminders may have a date and time associated with them, but don’t have to. Unlike Events, you can also set a Priority (None, Low, Medium, High) for a Reminder. Using a feature called “geofencing,” they can also be set to trigger on your iOS device when the device is physically near a location, using your device’s GPS and Location Services. Even cooler, geofencing can be set to trigger the reminder when you arrive at or leave a particular location. So that’s how the Siri personal assistant built into the iPhone 4S and later can deal with commands like “Text my wife when I leave the office.”

Were You Using or Sharing MobileMe Calendars?

Before you do anything with iCloud calendars (or actually, before you move to iCloud at all), it’s good to know two things: First, your MobileMe calendars will be moved to iCloud as part of the migration process. It’s a one-way trip; once you move your calendars to iCloud, there’s no going back. Second, anyone who was sharing your MobileMe calendars will immediately lose access to those shared calendars, unless they also migrate to iCloud. For example, my wife and I share many of our calendars, as well as each of us having private calendars. When I began preparing this book, I moved my calendars to iCloud, and immediately she lost access to my calendars, and I to hers. It wasn’t until I cajoled her into both upgrading to Mac OS X Lion and migrating to iCloud that we got our calendars back into sync by resubscribing to each other’s calendars in iCloud. So I recommend that if you share your calendars with one or more people, that you all be prepared to make the move to iCloud at virtually the same time, to avoid disruption.

In this book, I’m focusing on iCloud, rather than working with iCal or the iOS Calendar app, so I’ll deal mostly with working with events on the iCloud website, rather than in the Mac or iOS programs. However, because Reminders are so intimately connected with iCloud, I’ll be going into detail with the iOS Reminders app in the “Working with Reminders on Your iOS Device” section, later in this chapter.

Choosing iCloud will place the calendar on iCloud, where it can be shared by your other devices and by other people. If the calendar is on your Mac, it will be private and will only exist on the Mac where you created the calendar.

The Calendars popover appears, allowing you to name the new calendar . Enter the name, then click anywhere else to save it.

From the color pop-up menu next to the Name field, choose the color in which you want the calendar’s events to appear. One difference in iCal versus the Calendar app on iOS is that one of the color choices is Other, which when chosen brings up a color picker that allows you to choose any color you want, rather than a preset color.

Click OK.

To edit a calendar on an iOS device:

On your iPhone or iPad, start the Calendar app.

Tap the Calendars button.

The Calendars (iPhone) or Show Calendars (iPad) popover appears .

Tap the Edit button.

The screen name changes to Edit Calendars.

In the Calendar list, tap the name of an existing calendar.

In the Edit Calendar screen, change the name or the associated color of the calendar, then tap Done.

Using Alternative Calendar Programs with iCloud

Just because iCal comes with Mac OS X, that doesn’t mean that it’s universally beloved, or even especially liked, by people who are heavy calendar users. For those people (like me) who have been using calendars on a computer for a very long time, and have used excellent calendar programs over the years, iCal is too limited, too lowest-common-denominator, for our comfort. The trouble is that all of the really useful calendar features (event synchronization between devices, calendar sharing between people) use iCal (or at least its data file) and iCloud as a conduit.

Happily, if iCal isn’t feature-rich enough for your needs, a variety of alternative calendar programs still use the iCal calendar and reminders data and provide a superior calendaring experience. My favorite for Mac is BusyMac’s BusyCal which allows you to share events and to-dos over iCloud, MobileMe, or Google Calendar; gives you much more flexibility in calendar views; has easier event entry than iCal; has a wide variety of event types, such as all-day banners, sticky notes in the calendar, and graphics; and much more (BusyCal is also compatible with iCloud calendars even when it is running on a Mac with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, making calendar sharing possible for people who haven’t yet upgraded to Lion). Another good iCal alternative for the Mac is Flexibits’ Fantastical, which lives in your menubar and drops down when you need it. One really attractive thing about Fantastical is that it understands natural-language requests, so you can simply enter “Lunch next Tuesday at 2 with Cliff” and the program correctly parses the sentence and sets the calendar event.

On iOS, there are many alternatives for the Calendar app, but the one I use is called Calvetica , from Mysterious Trousers. I like it because of its minimalist design, and because it requires just a couple of taps (and the text entry for the event name, of course) to enter an event, far fewer than Calendar. It’s fast, lets you create an event quickly, and gets out of your way.

On iOS, the faster you can enter an event the better, which is why I prefer Calvetica, rather than the stock Calendars app.